ServerPilot - new hosting control panel for hosting PHP sites on VPSes

Go to page

New Member

After years of managing VPSes running Plesk or cPanel for developers who wish they had a secure, lightweight alternative, we've created ServerPilot. ServerPilot is a new control panel that is optimized for running websites on VPSes.

And, Mike, is that you?? We spoke about a year ago when Kevin and I were doing early customer development, talking to people about their workflows, their software, their customers, and the problems they run into. We met over in the WHT forums. We were called FreedomCP at the time but thankfully Kevin came up with a better name before we launched.

New Member

And, Mike, is that you?? We spoke about a year ago when Kevin and I were doing early customer development, talking to people about their workflows, their software, their customers, and the problems they run into. We met over in the WHT forums. We were called FreedomCP at the time but thankfully Kevin came up with a better name before we launched.

New Member

Anyway, just signed up for an account. I will add the first server tomorrow but I have a question - do you offer some sort of either

-API

-Downloadable version of ServerPilot that I can run on my own master server, if you will? I'm planning on using this to deploy a Point of Sale system but while its not that I don't trust you guys, I would feel better being in control of the infrastructure.

When a user sets an SSH/SFTP password in ServerPilot, on our side we immediately hash the password. We then transmit the hashed password over SSL to your server. On your server, the hashed password is then used as an argument to the command "usermod --password HASHEDPASSWORD USER", which is a way you can set a password on Linux using a already-hashed password.

New Member

So this is a remote control panel? I've always wanted make something like that. I was thinking of putting together a little panel that ran locally on your PC or phone so you wouldn't have to worry about others even having a chance to compromise the panel.

New Member

-Downloadable version of ServerPilot that I can run on my own master server, if you will? I'm planning on using this to deploy a Point of Sale system but while its not that I don't trust you guys, I would feel better being in control of the infrastructure.

We do have an API, but it's in beta and we aren't letting too many people use it yet. We're in the middle of changing our API and don't want to break things people have written. We should have it public in the next few months.

We don't have a version of our centralized component that you can run on your own infrastructure. It's something we're keeping in mind for the future.

Right now the only way we have to handle different servers on different plans is to have users create separate accounts for each plan. We do get this request a fair bit and we'll be working on a better solution. We greatly value simplicity in our interface and we need to figure out a way to do this but keep things very simple.

New Member

The concept (a remote CP) is great and an idea I've been pushing with a few of the companies I work with for some time since Parallels dropped theirs (or at least since I can't find many companies using it).

However, your website is quite basic and the plans don't really seem to work ($49/month just for logs?!)

I also can't find any terms etc. on your site, nor any business information.

New Member

We don't have a demo because we have a free plan that comes with a free trial of the paid plans. Signing up is quick and easy (no credit card is required). So, we encourage users to sign up, spin up a new server at their host, connect it to ServerPilot, and really see ServerPilot in action. It only takes about a minute to connect a new server.

The ServerPilot agent uses 20MB of memory. Other than that, there's some usage by services we install: Nginx (2MB), Apache (10MB), MySQL (45MB), and PHP-FPM (35MB).

New Member

So this is a remote control panel? I've always wanted make something like that. I was thinking of putting together a little panel that ran locally on your PC or phone so you wouldn't have to worry about others even having a chance to compromise the panel.

Exactly, it's a remote panel. We sometimes call it a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) hosting control panel, but that only resonates as a good explanation to people very familiar with SaaS software.

The security benefit of not having a control panel frontend running on each server is one of the main motivations for this architecture. I was a security researcher (e.g. Survivable Key Compromise in Software Update Systems, Attacks on Package Managers) before I founded ServerPilot. Over the years, I've been managing Plesk and cPanel servers for dev agencies and hosting companies and I just knew that if I put together an amazing team, we could revolutionize the control panel industry. We're one year in and it's been going great so far. We've got huge plans for the next five years.

New Member

The concept (a remote CP) is great and an idea I've been pushing with a few of the companies I work with for some time since Parallels dropped theirs (or at least since I can't find many companies using it).

However, your website is quite basic and the plans don't really seem to work ($49/month just for logs?!)

I also can't find any terms etc. on your site, nor any business information.

It's definitely the case that our paid plans are missing many features that some users need. We just launched a few months ago and we wanted to launch as soon as our system was production ready. We'll be adding a lot more features over the next couple of years. In the mean time, we try to talk to every user to find out what features they'd like to see and how ServerPilot could make their life easier and their business more profitable.

Here are our terms of service, which are linked at the bottom of every page.